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Bell-Labs Releases New Version Of Plan 9

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the from-outer-space dept.

F2F writes "Plan 9 from Bell Labs Fourth Release was announced yesterday marking a major overhaul of the entire operating system. VMware images are now supported, together with hoards of new hardware. The operating system now sports a new security model (on top of the old one, which was already quite secure), new network-resident secure storage system and improvements in the thread library, among others. See the release notes here: release4 notes or simply go to the download page at: plan9 download." T. adds: erikdalen sent in these links to critiques of the Plan 9 license from Richard Stallman and Nathan Myers.

5 of 314 comments (clear)

  1. UI by GypC · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Plan9 has some really cool ideas, the more Unix than Unix everything-as-a-file paradigm, the network transparent file system, directory merging, the list goes on and on.

    But I just can't get past the mouse-intensive UI. I absolutely hate it.

  2. Re:neat idea by sysjkb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    >He didnt know if anyone was actually using this in the real world though, does anyone here? Ncube uses Transit, a Plan 9 derivative. Ncube made MPP supercomputers "way back when" and now are famed for their gargantuan video-on-demand systems. Larry Ellison is the owner. --Jeffrey Boulier

  3. Re:If you don't like their license... by Dr.+Awktagon · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I think the points were 1) Lucent is claiming it's an "open source" license when it is not (and the term "open source software" is a registered mark, I believe). And 2) if you are considering using this OS, especially in a commercial setting, it is vitally important to understand the license, because it tells you what rights you get or give up by downloading the software.

    When people are offering you something for free, it's pretty rude to complain that they're not offering you even more.

    They aren't offering it "for free", they are offering it "with strings attached".

  4. VSTa by erikdalen · · Score: 2, Interesting

    An OS that is worth checking out if you like the ideas in Plan 9 is VSTa. It is a GPL'ed OS borrowing a lot of ideas from Plan 9. It's microkernel. But not as mature as Plan 9. /Erik

    --
    Erik Dalén
  5. Interesting question by kraf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does the plan 9 resident storage compare to the QNX qnet transparent network storage ?